AMERICAN MORAL EDUCATION: PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS

The more liberal the model of moral education in a given school,
the more likely it is to emphasize social service rather than the
acquisition of individual character virtues. Nevertheless, the
theoretical underpinnings of that aspect of character education are
largely absent or unacknowledged, and such programs of social
service continue to appear within a discourse of the training of
individual moral character and will in the virtues. Historically,
social structural interventions focusing on the group and the
community have been seen only rarely, such as in the progressive
movement in education in the mid-twentieth century.

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SERIES

This Post concludes a Series on AMERICAN MORAL EDUCATION –
attempts to teach “values,” mostly in American public schools. That
topic may interest Chinese as China attempts to strengthen its own
moral education.

American approaches to moral education are reported in the first
Chapter of an important new book critiquing Western ethics. This
Series has provided the successive sections of that Chapter. This
Post concludes with PHILOSOPHICAL background and critique.

Overall a main point is that recent approaches, despite thinking
they are returning to Greek “virtue ethics,” misinterpret the Greek
notion of character, making it into a matter of individual
DECISIONS, not social HABITS.

Another main point is that this individualist-volitional account
of moral agency PERSONALIZES and DEPOLITICIZES moral discourse,
blaming individuals for misbehavior and social ills while diverting
attention from societal issues of power and justice.

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INTRODUCTION

ARISTOTLE VERSUS KANT

PERSON AND CONTEXT

CONCLUSION

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131214

AMERICAN MORAL EDUCATION: PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS

From Heidi Ravven 2013 The self beyond itself., 41-51.

[For Notes, please consult the original printed book, where they
are numbered differently. Here section Headings have been added or
shortened.]

INTRODUCTION

From the beginning, moral education in America has taken an
individualist free will and personal commitment perspective,
emerging from the memorization of, recital of, and commitment to
the Christian catechism. That Protestant model of moral education
has been the bedrock to which all other experiments have eventually
returned. It was everywhere in the schools and classrooms I
visited, it was evident in the moral educators I talked with, and
it still dominates current popular books on the subject. The
central model buried deep in the American psyche revolves around
individual moral choice: using one’s free will to act in conformity
with principles and virtues. Even if we consider liberal models of
moral education since the 1960s (values clarification, Kohlbergian
cognitive moral developmentalism, and Gilligan’s caring alternative
to Kohlberg), we still find that, like character education, the
focus is on individual choices and decision making. All four models
seem to presuppose that social problems are moral problems and are
due to aggregates of bad individual choices and personal decisions.
As a result, social problems are to be attacked and remedied by
changing personal decision-making processes, and hence individuals’
choices. The set of shared assumptions about what it means to be
moral, how a moral person develops, why a moral person acts
morally, and how moral weakness can be changed to moral goodness
and strength share implicit presuppositions about how social
problems arise and can be remedied. In the American context, the
term character points to individual morality and behavior driven by
personal free choices and decisions. Insofar as social problems are
seen as signaling the failure of what is variously termed
character, caring, or rational choice, they are chalked up to
failures of personal will, the remedy for which involves changing
that will, person by person.

Both standard character education and its seeming opposite, the
ethic of caring, use stories to sway individuals’ emotions—although
the stories in character education are focused on illustrating and
inculcating various virtues, while the focus in the ethic of caring
is to illustrate and recommend cases of caring behavior. In both,
however, the final stage is presented as making the right decision.
Children are instructed to make a choice according to a learned and
adopted value or principle illustrated in the story. From that
choice or decision a moral commitment and obligation emerge. While
both character and caring moral education involve both emotions and
thinking, Kohlbergian moral education is strictly cognitivist or
about rational choice. Nevertheless, the notion of personal
commitment, which is to say some form of free will, pervades all
the models as the sine qua non of ethics, for the individual will
is brought into conformity through commitment (whether affectively
tinged or not) with larger virtues or principles and with other
wills. It is choice and decision that are thought to bring the
individual into the moral arena, whether that domain is thought of
as universal moral truths or, alternatively, as relation and
community (Gilligan, Noddings). Both liberal and conservative
versions take the form of free commitment to moral demands even
though both character education and also caring moral education, in
contrast to Kohlberg and values clarification, use the language of
virtues and habits rather than free decision making and choice.

ARISTOTLE VERSUS KANT

Daniel K. Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez in the authoritative
Handbook of Child Psychology, seventh edition, make the point that
all the current kinds of moral education programs in schools today
are fundamentally about individual free will, choice, and
responsibility, and that makes them Kantian. The major model in the
West of what it means to be ethical is Immanuel Kant’s: (1) the
identification of universal moral principles of right action, (2)
the discernment of how these principles can be applied in actual
situations, and (3) the commitment and resolve of the free will to
act upon those principles when such practical situations arise.
Kantian ethics is about moral obligation to principles that set out
as a duty the performance of certain kinds of actions on those
principles in relevant situations. It depends on a kind of
cognitive skill to determine the relevant principle in a situation,
and then a resolve of the will to act upon it. Classical Greek
philosophical ethics, in contrast, generally was based on the
Delphic maxim “Know thyself.” For the Greek philosophers the
fullest understanding possible of human nature, political
institutions, and the nature of the cosmos was the basis of the
ethical life. From a Kantian perspective, however, ethics is more
narrowly about action: how discrete actions are chosen and what
standards they conform to. The kind of knowledge involved is,
therefore, narrow and focused rather than broad and open-ended.
Knowledge in the modern, Kantian perspective offers precise
answers, whereas for Aristotle, and for Plato before him, it is a
way of life, an open-ended engagement in a quest for understanding
the world and the human place within it, which is the virtuous life
itself. For moderns, ethics is properly about doing, whereas for
the Greek philosophical tradition, it was about the transformation
of the self through gaining wisdom about what it means to be human,
within the biological and cosmological natural order, within the
social arena (for Aristotle), and within an underlying mathematized
scientific universe and within the political community (for Plato).
For the Greeks, all knowledge, not just some discrete arena of
moral education, was thought to be contributory to ethics. In the
Kantian notion of ethics, ethics and the broad knowledge of the
world seem to have been torn apart in ways that would be completely
anathema to the ancient Greeks.

The Kantian notion of ethics expresses a Latin Christian
approach to our human moral nature—albeit secularized on the
surface. Perhaps it is ironic that the three liberal versions of
moral education so criticized by the main revivers of traditional
character education share with moral character education a
perspective based on free will and personal decision making. But
both liberal and conservative varieties are Kantian and Christian.
And this is despite the fact that character education on the face
of it seems to be not about freedom of the will but instead about
training the personality in habits of virtue—an ancient Greek,
Aristotelian view of moral agency. Lapsley and Narvaez recognize
that the term character education is, however, a misnomer, for the
American movement of character education is in fact not at all the
transformation of character in the Aristotelian sense as the name
suggests and as it purports to be. Ironically, perhaps, character
education programs do very little to train kids in particular
situations; instead they present hypothetical stories and ask kids
to identify the correct virtue that was chosen and acted upon in
the story. They repeatedly instruct children in the identification
of abstract moral principles and in action that conforms to those
principles, with much rewarding of the correct answers to
questions, but they do not provide much in the way of the
behaviorist-style training of action that one would expect from the
name. Instead, they tell and retell stories and reshape historical
events and personalities so that they exhibit clear black-and-white
moral principles that students then are supposed to identify and be
inspired to commit themselves to choose and act upon
accordingly.

The idea of habits, in contrast to decisions and free choices,
implies an automatic and even unconscious way of acting, rather
than the reflective and self-aware independent choices and
decisions of the free will. The training of character in habits of
virtue goes back to Aristotle’s ethics. The advocates of moral
character education are explicitly aligning themselves with an
Aristotelian notion of moral psychology and agency. But in the
American context, the Aristotelian notion of personal character has
been reshaped through the lens of free will, that is, through a
Kantian lens. And that Kantian lens is fundamentally Christian, not
Aristotelian. It owes a great deal to the Christian appropriation
and transformation of Aristotle, especially by Thomas Aquinas in
the thirteenth century. (I discuss the Christian origins of free
will and the Christianization of Aristotle at some length in
Chapter Four.) The use of the term character education muddies our
understanding of how character education programs actually attempt
to educate children’s morals. In practice, character educators use
a (Kantian) model of choosing actions that accord with principles
(or virtues) to which children have freely committed themselves,
rather than a model that involves training behavior. Why, then, use
this term, which is a misdescription, rather than a term that more
accurately describes the process?

Character educators appear less committed to the individualist
model of ethics than liberals do. But when it comes to looking at
what they actually do, they are in fact more committed than are
liberals to a model of society based on individual free decision
making and individual responsibility. What the moral character
educators seem to be signaling by their use of the term is their
disdain for nonauthoritarian models of moral education, in contrast
with their own more authoritarian one. But in terms of the
dependence on individual free will and responsibility, both
liberals and conservatives are playing the same game—a Western,
Christian, Kantian game. The character educators no less than the
liberal moral educators have little use for an Aristotelian
conception of ethics. They do not train children in moral habits,
nor, as Lapsley and Narvaez point out, do they raise the question
of what kind of life brings overall fulfillment. In contrast to the
model used by character educators, a (true) ethics of virtuous
character (virtue ethics) has two outstanding features: (1) it
makes a claim about the best human life, about what is required for
human flourishing, and (2) it includes an account of how best to
conduct one’s life and oneself in keeping with that notion of human
fulfillment, flourishing, and excellence. Neither of these
considerations is operative in standard character education as it
has been conceptualized and implemented in American schools either
historically or at present. In the American school setting, the
term virtues is used to identify principles of right action
(instead of human excellences, the classical Greek arête) that are
to be adopted as morally obligatory. Their rightness is not
connected to an Aristotelian account of what is biologically
natural for the human species, nor is it about what uniquely
fulfills our humanity. It never calls for a broad and general quest
to learn about the human and the natural worlds, which Aristotle
deemed essential for the discovery of the good human life. Instead,
Lapsley and Narvaez say, we run up against a Kantian set of
assumptions, for it is all about discrete actions conforming to
principles of right action.

In most accounts of character education one cultivates virtues
mostly to better fulfill one’s obligation and duty (the ethics of
requirement) or to prevent the rising tide of youth disorder
(character utilitarianism or the ethics of consequences). . . .
[T]he point of virtues in most accounts of character education is
to live up to the prescriptions derived from deontic
considerations: to respect persons, fulfill one’s duty to the self
and to others, submit to natural law. When the goal of character
education is to help children “know the good” this typically means
coming to learn the “cross-cultural composite of moral imperatives
and ideals.” Rather than emphasize agent appraisal[,] the animating
goal of many character educators is appraisal of actions, for, as
Wynne and Hess . . . put it, “character is conduct” and the best
test of a “school’s moral efficiency” is “pupils’ day-to-day
conduct, displayed through deeds and words.”

Thus, against their stated intentions, character educators and
the liberal supporters of a Kohlbergian approach have a great deal
in common with each other and little in common with the Greek
philosophical notion of ethics they claim to embrace:

Character education, for all its appeal to virtues, seems to
embrace the ethics of requirement just as surely as does moral
stage theory, rather than an ethics of virtue. The most important
moral facts for both paradigms are still facts about obligation,
universal principles and duty. The most important object of
evaluation for both paradigms is still action and conduct: it is
still deciding the good thing to do rather than the sort of person
to become. The fact [is] that character education is . . .
thoroughly deontological and utilitarian with . . . little in
common with virtue ethics.

Lapsley and Narvaez propose that the difference between those
who call themselves character educators and the champions of more
liberal models is largely about the role of authority and hierarchy
in moral education. Character educators embrace the transmission of
ready-made moral principles on authority, whereas educators who are
more liberal have a constructivist concern as well: they want to
involve young people not only in the commitment to values but also
in their formation. What I wish to call attention to here is what
the different models of moral education in America share: a
reliance on a notion of free will, decision making, and obligation
to follow discrete moral principles as guides for action. That
assumption is not universal across cultures (we just saw that it
was absent for the Greeks). Instead, I argue in this book, it is
highly specific to our own culture. And even the adversarial
positions within our culture share a deeper and larger implicit
religio-cultural framework that emerged from an ongoing cultural
context and its particular Christian theological history. American
moral education has inherited a past rooted in the teaching of the
Christian catechism, and while it has gone in several disparate
directions, it remains nevertheless beholden to theological notions
of human nature and agency.

PERSON AND CONTEXT.

What makes John Dewey’s model of progressive education an
alternative to both the character education championed by
conservatives and the moral education promoted by Kohlbergians and
other liberals is that it recommended contextual interventions into
social structures rather than direct attempts to educate or
manipulate the individual will. Dewey’s model builds upon the
social determination or shaping of action that Hartshorne and May
exposed in the 1920s and which has been confirmed by a great deal
of subsequent research. That social interventions and institutional
incentives shape moral action undermines Kohlberg’s moral cognitive
developmentalist and the caring models just as much as it
challenges traditional moral character education. Furthermore, the
effectiveness in the classroom of Kohlberg’s cognitive
developmental model of moral reasoning and decision making has been
shown to suffer from additional problems. For the research shows
that, pace Kohlberg, “only weak associations between moral
reasoning and moral behavior have been detected and these
associations lack practical significance among school-aged
populations.” Hence neither approach to the training of the
individual will, whether by authoritative transmission of values or
by the development of reasoning skills in decision making, shows
evidence of effectiveness. Lapsley and Narvaez suggest that the
conclusion we ought to draw from the research into moral
development is that it is “at the intersection of person and
context where one looks for a coherent behavioral signature.” “The
inextricable union of person and context,” they propose, “is the
lesson both of developmental contextualism . . . and social
cognitive approaches to personality.” As a result, “moral education
can [i.e., must] never be simply about the character of children
without also addressing the context of education, that is to say,
the culture, climate, structure and function of classrooms and
schools.” Lapsley and Narvaez end their essay on character
education on a hopeful and instructive note, commenting that
outcomes research shows that there are effective ways to ameliorate
just those “moral” problems that particularly conservatives
identified in youth, namely, the use and abuse of alcohol, drunk
driving, use of illicit drugs, early sexual intercourse, high rates
of depression and suicide, violence, gambling—but the effective
interventions are systemic and structural rather than individual
character- or will-based.

Schools characterized by communal organization, that is, by
mutually supportive relationships among teachers, administrators,
and students, a commitment to common goals and norms, and a sense
of collaboration, tend to have students who report an attachment to
school (an emotional bond to teachers or school and a sense of
belonging), a belief in the legitimacy of rules and norms, and a
high value placed on work. . . . [B]onding to school, was related,
in turn, to lower levels of student misconduct and
victimization.

The Seattle Social Development Research Group, for example,
launched a project in 1981 in eight local public elementary schools
guided by a social development model according to which it was
assumed that behavior is learned within social environments rather
than by adopting and applying explicit principles or values. The
presupposition was that “when socialization goes well a social bond
of attachment and commitment is formed . . . [which] in turn
orients the child to the norms and expectations of the group to
which one is attached and to the values endorsed by the group.” The
Seattle Social Development project “demonstrated long-term positive
effects on numerous adolescent health-risk behaviors (e.g., violent
delinquency, heavy drinking, sexual intercourse, having multiple
sex partners, pregnancy and school misconduct) and on school
bonding.” “But is this character education?” Lapsley and Narvaez
ask. They remark that the answer “depends on whether character
education is defined by treatment or by outcomes.” The Seattle
Social Development project has “generated [the] empirical outcomes
that are claimed for character education” but has been guided by “a
social development model” and not by a theoretical model “of
virtue, morality, or character.” A similar project of the
Developmental Studies Center in San Francisco has “documented the
crucial role that children’s sense of community plays in promoting
a wide range of outcomes commonly associated with character
education, including altruistic, cooperative and helping behavior,
concern for others, prosocial conflict resolution, and trust in and
respect for teachers.” What was important about the schools in the
project was that they met children’s “basic needs for belonging,
autonomy, and competence.” The sense of community in the schools
that took part in the project was developed through “collaborating
on common academic goals; providing and receiving help from others;
discussion and reflection upon the experiences of self and others
as it relates to prosocial values such as fairness, social
responsibility and justice; practicing social competencies; and
exercising autonomy by participating in decisions about classroom
life and taking responsibility for it.” Thus a sense of community
in the schools was “promoted through [changes in the] structures of
the classroom and the school.”

Another important structural intervention studied was community
service and service learning, the latter differing from the former
in the extent to which it is linked to the academic curriculum.
Service projects engage aspects of identity formation in
adolescents and are instrumental in transforming social and moral
civic identity, according to current research. These interventions,
too, showed important positive outcomes in the behavioral issues
identified as important by the moral character educators. So the
positive outcomes in the various areas were brought about by “a
developmental systems approach” to intervention in youth behavior.
Lapsley and Narvaez conclude that the evidence points to using “a
developmental systems approach” to moral education rather than the
current “epistemological approach” of character education, which is
“preoccup[ied] with core values,” adding, “A developmental systems
orientation is foundational to the positive youth development
perspective that has emerged as a counter to a risks-and-deficits
model of adolescent development.” Yet “not one of the youth
developmental programs apparently viewed their competency-building
and prevention work in terms of moral or character development.”
The notion of what counts as ethics and moral training is clearly
caught in a religio-cultural time warp that affects not only
conservatives, who are more likely at present to acknowledge their
religious roots, but also liberals, who tend at present to regard
their outlook as secular. While Lapsley and Narvaez do not try to
account for the conceptual bind that moral education seems to be
in, they do recommend that a social systems approach that
explicitly recognizes that what it is doing is in fact moral
education ought to be developed out of the successful systems
approach already well established in addressing just those youth
social problems that ironically the conservatives argued are
evidence of the effects of the paucity in American schools of
authoritarian moral character education.

The conceptual framework for character education is adequately
anticipated by a commitment to a developmental systems orientation.
A developmental systems approach to [moral] character education
draws attention to embedded and overlapping systems of influence
that exist at multiple levels; to the fact that dispositional
coherence is a joint product of personal and contextual factors
that are in dynamic interaction across the lifetime.

It turns out, in fact, that many schools have recently adopted a
more systems-oriented approach to changing the culture of their
school—and they have done so because it works. The Character
Education Partnership now gives public recognition, through its
National Schools of Character designation, to schools that use
eclectic approaches as well as to those that implement the original
character education model that was a revival of early
twentieth-century moral education. When I met with Merle Schwartz,
director of education and research at the Character Education
Partnership in Washington, D.C., she talked a great deal about
“school climate” as well as about moral behavior. Part of
Schwartz’s job is to go to schools all over the country as a
consultant, helping to diagnose their problems and working with
school representatives—administrators, teachers, students, staff,
and parents—to devise situation-specific remedies that can help
change both school climate and student behavior. I also visited
several schools that had introduced mixed models, in which kids
seemed engaged and happy rather than subdued and sullen, as they
were in the Fillmore School. Nevertheless, the theoretical
philosophical move that Narvaez and Lapsley recommend—redefining
what ethics is about, what its domain is, and what moral
development entails—is more a hope than a present reality.

Narvaez and Lapsley also propose adding to the structural
intervention in social climate a new (or, really, the revival of an
ancient Greek) approach to individual personal ethics. Rather than
the pervasive model of instilling conformity to a set of objective
virtues or principles, as standard character education envisions,
or an open-ended discussion of the right ways to think about and
determine right actions in various situations, as in values
clarification and Kohlbergian rational decision-making models,
Lapsley and Narvaez recommend the introduction into the moral
education curriculum of an Aristotelian-type exploration of human
flourishing—virtue in the real Aristotelian sense. Teachers, they
say, should be asking the questions that occupied the Greek
philosophers: What makes for a deeply satisfying human life? What
does it mean for a given person or for people in general to
flourish and thrive, and what does it take for that to happen? They
suggest that the educational research on moral development now
shows that the notion of thriving within a given context (the
current buzzword is developmental contextualism) is the proper
“basis for understanding the role of adaptive person-context
relations in human development.” They conclude their essay on an
Aristotelian note: “Perhaps a life course perspective on character
will require additional constructs such as wisdom . . . , purpose .
. . , personal goals . . . , spirituality and self-transcendence .
. . , ecological citizenship . . . , and character strengths . . .
to capture adequately the complexity of phase-relevant
dispositional coherence and human flourishing.”

CONCLUSION

We have seen through this brief account of moral education in
schools that in recent decades in America both conservatives and
liberals have focused on the individual rather than the community
as the site, source, and focus of morals. For conservatives the
focus is the training of the individual will, an emphasis seen from
the earliest moral training in the adoption of the catechism to the
various more recent forms of character education, while for
liberals it is the more recent rational decision-making approach
and its variants, which highlight individual free will. The only
structural approach in moral education was that introduced in the
early mid-twentieth century by John Dewey and others influenced by
him, and it is still evident in a certain tendency of Kohlberg’s to
introduce democratic structures that in turn underlie rational
decision making. That approach persists today in some pockets of
experiment: the democratic and caring school movements, and also
the many service projects that connect students to the larger
society and the world. The more liberal the model of moral
education in a given school, the more likely it is to emphasize
social service rather than the acquisition of individual character
virtues. Nevertheless, the theoretical underpinnings of that aspect
of character education are largely absent or unacknowledged, and
such programs of social service continue to appear within a
discourse of the training of individual moral character and will in
the virtues. Historically, social structural interventions focusing
on the group and the community have been seen only rarely, such as
in the progressive movement in education in the mid-twentieth
century.

The initial thrust toward a social structural approach, at least
to moral education, did not meet its demise because of the triumph
of liberalism. Rather, UCLA philosopher John McCumber has put
together considerable evidence that the social philosophy of Dewey
and others was eclipsed because of the McCarthy era’s pointed
attacks on philosophy departments and especially on those
philosophers who taught and engaged in social philosophy. To write
about or teach social philosophy and to address issues of ethics in
terms of social structure as formative of moral action became
anathema in the political climate of the 1950s; what subsequently
ensued was a period of forgetting, a forgetting that now allows
social conservatives to attack liberals for decimating and
fragmenting the social arena when, in fact, that occurred in part
as a result of a right-wing attack on Communists, Socialists, and
their sympathizers in universities. Nevertheless, the fragility of
social philosophy and moral education models based on it bespeaks
the foundational nature of the free will perspective in America.
Narvaez and Lapsley are trying in a small way to revive social
philosophy as a basis for rethinking what ethics is really about
and how virtue can be taught.

_______________________________________________________________

GUEST BLOGGER

Heidi M. Ravven is a Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton
College in Central New York. She is a leading proponent of basing
ethical philosophy on empirical studies of how human beings
actually function, particularly as revealed by current
neuroscience.

PHOTO

Ravven has published widely on Jewish philosphers Spinoza and
Maimonides and on Jewish ethics and Jewish feminism. Ravven’s 2013
book The Self Beyond Itself explores Moral Agency: why we are
moral, why and when we are not, and how to get people to be more
moral.

_______________________________________________________________

2013 BOOK

Current American public culture, both conservative and liberal,
assumes an ethic of individual responsibility. People are supposed
to know right from wrong and, on the basis of their own “free
will,” make DECISIONS to act rightly, almost regardless of
circumstances. That distinctive American moral culture derives from
the rest of Western Christianity, particularly historical American
Protestantism. An important new book – The self beyond itself, by
American Jewish philosopher Heidi Ravven – critiques the entire
Latin Christian ethical tradition. Ravven bases her critique on
both historical-philosphical and modern-scientific grounds.

Historically, Ravven argues that Western Christianity “went
wrong” in Late Antiquity and the High Middle Ages when it adopted
and enforced the punitive notion of “free will.” Ravven advocates
instead a return to the more positive ancient Greek view of moral
character as the cultivation of good moral HABITS through striving
to understand the place of the Self in society and nature.
Individuals are strongly embedded in society, and society is
responsible for fostering natural “human flourishing.” That ancient
tradition was last advanced in the 1600s by the Dutch Jewish
philosopher Spinoza, whose insights into the natural emotional
component of healthy human functioning have been largely ignored by
rationalistic Westerners.

Scientifically, there is now increasing evidence that Aristotle
and Spinoza “got it right.” Studies of animals suggest that
“normativity” evolved naturally as part of society. Studies of
human infants suggest that, from the beginning, they are highly
social. Studies of the determinants of moral or immoral behavior
show that social context matters more than individual character or
“will.” Above all, recent studies of the human brain reveal that
the human “self” relies heavily for its identity and functioning
both on non-conscious habits and on a supportive society. Ravven
argues that rationalistic “free will” is a distinctively Christian
cultural myth. Nevertheless, individuals still strongly identify
with their own actions and can assume responsibility for them.

Ravven, a Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College in
Central New York, is a leading proponent of empirically-based
ethics. In this book, she writes accessibly for the general reader,
covering a huge range of topics in plain English and with a light
touch. Chinese should benefit both from her revealing Christian
assumptions that underlie Western “modernity” and from her
explaining the relevance to philosophy and politics of natural and
social science. Chinese may wish to compare Western emphasis on
individualism with Chinese recognition of sociality.

_______________________________________________________________

GUEST BLOGGER

Heidi M. Ravven is a Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton
College in Central New York. She is a leading proponent of basing
ethical philosophy on empirical studies of how human beings
actually function, particularly as revealed by current
neuroscience.

Ravven has published widely on Jewish philosphers Spinoza and
Maimonides and on Jewish ethics and Jewish feminism. Ravven's 2013
book The Self Beyond Itself explores Moral Agency: why we are
moral, why and when we are not, and how to get people to be more
moral.

总访问量：博主简介

韦爱德Edwin A. Winckler (韦爱德) is an American political scientist (Harvard BA, MA, and PhD) who has taught mostly in the sociology departments at Columbia and Harvard. He has been researching China for a half century, publishing books about Taiwan’s political economy (Sharpe, 1988), China’s post-Mao reforms (Rienner, 1999), and China’s population policy (Stanford, 2005, with Susan Greenhalgh). Recently he has begun also explaining American politics to Chinese. So the purpose of this Blog is to call attention to the best American media commentary on current American politics and to relate that to the best recent American academic scholarship on American politics. Winckler’s long-term institutional base remains the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University in New York City. However he and his research have now retreated to picturesque rural Central New York.